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Cryptography everywhere

Halfway through my first week, I learned already a lot of new things. Monday was pretty chill, did some touring in the city with the secretary and got to know my boss in person. Everyone was friendly and easy going. In the afternoon I got introduced to the company’s products and fields of business which are Smart-card systems and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). Yesterday and today I got extensive workshop-sessions from my daily supervisor. We covered A LOT.

We started of with the basic concepts and techniques of the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) and Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) API’s, basically the components that put security and crypto into the Java platform. I got drilled in symmetric and asymmetric cryptography algorithms, with all the flavors. Going from CBC to EBC to ECC. Hybrid cryptographic concepts, signing of files and PKI’s. It was overwhelming and nice to learn. But needless to say a mild headache got the better of me today. Oh, and to top it off: some of the slides were in German. Jup, German. But my supervisor was very good in explaining it in perfect English. So I had that going for me, which is nice.

Tomorrow I start on the real job , which I cannot really disclose the details of but basically it’s penetration testing/information extraction in an Android environment. Anyhow, very interesting start of the internship and everybody is nice, friendly and more important, they are experts in their respective fields, simply amazing.

Cheers,

H4

PS: Did you know that intelliCard forked the open-source BouncyCastle library and adapted it for Android! Awesome, I know 😀 : http://intellicastle.org

PPS: My daily supervisor is a security wizard. The things he knows is from my perspective, endless. He wrote a lot of useful software: http://www.borderzone-software.ch/ Take a look at the FileBrowser: simply the most useful swiss army knife every IT-guy needs. (PUN INTENDED)